How To Create A Gift Station [And What One Is!]

We all have a variety of wrapping supplies in our house, of that I have no doubt – but where do you keep it all? Today I wanted to look at how I recently created my own Gift Station to give you some hints and tips if you are thinking of getting this area of your home more organised.

An organising project from me wouldn’t be complete without using my favourite methods, now would it!

Therefore as always I wanted to use my ADORE method of organising  to tackle this project step by step.

This is honestly the only thing you need to follow to pretty much ensure that you get a result that you want – so without further ado let’s get going on it and first up is of course the “before”

Here’s what my gift wrapping area looked like before sorting:-

The first part of the ADORE method is A for Assess.

Working out where you are going to put things is key to this stage, and you need to bear in mind how you like to use them, where and why.

We are lucky enough to have a guest bedroom in our house, with enough space for this large chest of drawers that we bought last year at a little furniture shop when on a family day out.

I’m always looking for things that work in the house, and knew that this would be a good fit for the space available, with the thought in the back of my mind that it would be perfect to store gift items.

This room is perfect for storing all this sort of stuff, as I can lay things out on the bed when something like Christmas is coming up – and there’s enough floor space to do my wrapping (I prefer to sit on the floor for this so do what works for you!). It is also easy to make tidy when we have guests, and everything can be stored away out of sight as we don’t need access to it when guests are here either.

So – the WHERE is answered – the chest of drawers in the guest bedroom.

Other good places may be under a bed, in the kitchen, in the home office etc…. – but I would always advise trying to store the items where you are most likely to wrap them as well – so you don’t constantly have to walk around the house getting things.

Next stage is D for Declutter.

Using my trusty decluttering categories, and my declutter method – I got everything out of the chest of drawers, and sorted it all out into the right categories.

I found items for other rooms, items that were no longer needed, and also started to work out what I had that was gift related that I wanted to keep

TIP – When putting things in the KEEP pile, try and put like with like so that what you have can be more clearly seen

Next step was O for Organise

Now, organising can be overwhelming in itself, so again I have a handy method to get this stage done more easily – and that is the acronym LAST (I like to remember it by the saying “get organised at last”).

L stands for “Like with Like”

I had already pretty much done this in my declutter stage, but I also went round the house to see whether there was anything else gift related that I could add to any of the piles I had.

My piles consisted of the main categories as follows:-

• Wrapping paper
• Gift bags
• Cards and notelets
• Christmas specific wrapping items
• General wrapping supplies (sticky tape, pens, labels etc…)

A stands for “Assign a Home”

I wanted to pretty much have a drawer for each category of item, so it was easy to grab what I wanted, and I also wanted to put them in drawers that would make the most sense to how I use things when I am wrapping things.

As said previously, I sit down when wrapping, so it makes sense for me to be able to have all my little wrapping supplies close to hand – so I assigned the bottom drawer to these.

TIP – I literally just put them in the space at this point to see whether it all fit etc… – making it prettier and more organised comes a little later!

Following on from this logic, the cards went in the next drawer up:-

Then the Christmas items went in the middle drawer. The reasoning for this is that the middle drawer for me is the least accessible (I have to stand up and bend to reach it) and I don’t need to use Christmas items all year round of course.

Then the last 2 drawers were filled firstly with packaging items and secondly with gift bags. These are items I can easily grab and go so I am happy to stand and get these when needed.

This then left me with the wrapping paper and 2 small drawers.

Wrapping paper wouldn’t fit in any of the drawers as it was too long, but there is a space between the chest of drawers and the wall on the left that would work to store it for now, so that’s where I put it for the time being.

And the 2 smaller drawers? These would be perfect for guests to put their bits and pieces when they stay – so these stayed empty.

S stands for “Store”

This basically means that you want to look at storage for your items, so that they are kept together, and are easily accessible.

I am not one to buy storage for the sake of storage, and so I looked at what was in the drawers and then went around the house to find anything I could use first.

I found some old boxes from Christmas gifts that I used to contain the wrapping supplies – and this worked really well:-

and I had a few of these little baskets that fit greetings cards well, and fit exactly in the drawers so I used these for all my cards so I could more easily group things like Birthday cards, special occasions, blank etc….

And the only other thing that I wanted to use a container of some kind for (because obviously the drawers were container as well!), was the wrapping paper.

I simply used a Command Hook on the side of the chest of drawers, grabbed an old plastic wrapping paper carrier bag that was given to me when I bought some, put all the paper inside and hooked it on. Perfect and an easy way to store it so that I can grab the whole lot when I need some paper.

(I may upgrade at some point to a proper Gift Wrap Bag, but for now this did the trick perfectly well – it doesn’t have to be perfect to work!)

And finally – T is for Tag

Anything that you get organised will benefit from a label or tag of some kind.

It means that others know exactly what goes where, and you can keep things that bit tidier all the time.

All I did here was to label the inside part of each drawer with what goes in each drawer, using my Label Maker**.

And that was it!

A much more pleasing place to do any card writing or gift wrapping, I’m sure you’ll agree!

The last 2 steps of organising are R for Real Life & E for Evaluate

These two steps will be ongoing with me for a while.

I have to live with the system I have set up, and then work out if anything could/should be changed as a result.

Organising is a never ending journey – but hopefully this system will work for many years to come!

So – next time you are organising – go through this method and see results fast!

ASSESS – DECLUTTER – ORGANISE (LAST – Like with Like, Assign a Home, Store, Tag) – REAL LIFE – EVALUATE